Montana Literature resources
Eng11 Elective
Copies of Books on Hand 3/08
Making Certain it Goes On - Hugo 23
Selected Poems - Hugo 16
The Surrounded - McNickle 31
Fools Crow - Welch 33
Tough Trip Through Paradise - Garcia 30
Journals of Lewis & Clark - 16
Ordered?
The Big Sky
We Pointed Them North
Winter Wheat
The Undying West
Montana Literature: Reading and Writing and the Sense of Place
Montana is fortunate to have a rich literary tradition. Many Montana writers have earned national reputations by telling stories about what life has been like at various times in “the last best place.” This course will explore some of the best-loved works of Montana literature, including fiction, memoirs and poetry.
Students in this course will not only read Montana literature, they will create some. Using the readings to form important questions, they will gather stories from their own family or community, researching in family photo albums, old newspapers, and other documents, and conducting oral history interviews. Each student will be expected to finish one previously unpublished story based on this research.
The reading will pay special attention to several important themes that occur over and over in Montana’s literature:
Men and Women and Families in Literature: Many Montana writers have written about the joys and challenges of living in families, including differences and similarities in male and female nature and character; possibilities of conflict between men and women; equality, subordination, oppression, rebellion, manipulation, conflict, harmony, and happiness in the relations between the sexes; love, courtship, marriage, maternity and paternity; ideals of masculinity and femininity.
Nature in Literature: We will pay attention to the role of nature and the landscape in literary works; relations between human beings and the natural world; obligations of human beings toward nature; conflicts between ecological and human interests; proper and improper uses of nature; meaning and role of natural forces and phenomena in literature; natural objects as symbols.
American Indians in Literature: We will explore how American Indians are represented in literature, discussing the relationship between culture and place; stories and storytellers in community; struggle and conflict with living between diverse worlds; traditional roles, stereotypes, and ideals of American Indians; cultural and personal loss and survival; concepts of power, success, relatedness, dreams, humor, and the sacred; the representation of heroes.
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie
The Big Sky is the first of Pulitzer Prize winning author A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s, epic adventure novels of Montana’s vast frontier. In The Big Sky we will explore Montana during the fur trade era, traveling with Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, three of the most memorable characters in Western American literature. Traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, married to the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief. In The Big Sky, Guthrie gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spacious land and a unique way of life.
We Pointed Them North (Paperback) by E. C. ("Teddy Blue") Abbott $13.57
Blue’s recollections present a delightful view of cowboy life, drama, and humor during the great cattle drive and cattle ranching era. This fast-paced and irreverent memoir presents a vivid view of the real cowboy and the code that drove their action. Teddy Blue took part in the original cattle drives from the South to the Montana prairies and he tells the unforgettable stories of what young men in wild country did and thought.
The Undying West: A Chronicle of Montana’s Camas Prairie (Paperback) by Carlene Cross $9.66
In The Undying West, Carlene Cross creates a memorable blend of personal and Flathead Reservation history. It’s a wonderful model of writing based on family history research. She presents both homesteader and native views of the homestead era. The voices in her stories include those of her father and his “sod-busting” friends; the Salish, Kootenai, Nez Perce, and Iroquois Indians; the fossil remains of Montana’s prehistory; and even the wind, the soil, and the prairie grasses. She offers a personal testament to the enduring qualities of the West.
Winter Wheat (Paperback) by Mildred Walker $11.16
Montana’s literature is especially rich in its stories of what life was like for women here. With an arid “dry-land” wheat farm as both its geographic and metaphoric center, Winter Wheat--a One-Book Montana selection--is a love story in which eighteen-year-old Ellen Webb comes to understand herself better, but also comes to see her parents’ marriage in a new light. Her Vermont-born father and Russian-born mother, married during the first World War, have come as homesteaders to Barton, Montana - a grain-elevator and general store. It is 1940, the year Ellen will start college if the wheat harvest is good. The harvest pays and Ellen goes off to college, where she immediately falls in love: “I hadn’t meant to fall in love so soon, but there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like planning to seed in April and then having it come off so warm in March that the earth is ready.” Ellen and Gil plan their marriage for after the summer harvest. But Gil arrives and doesn’t find Montana or the life of dry-land wheat farmers beautiful. Ellen begins to see everything, including her parents, with new eyes in this poignant examination of love and life.
Fools Crow (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback) by James Welch $10.20
Suspenseful and moving, written with an authenticity and integrity that give it sweeping power, Welch’s third novel is a masterful evocation of a Native American culture and its passing. From their lodges on the endless Montana plains, the members of the Lone Eaters band of the Pikuni (Blackfeet) Indians live in harmony with nature, hunting the “blackhorns” (buffalo), observing a complex system of political administration based on mutual respect and handing down legends that explain the natural world and govern daily conduct. We watch the escalating tensions between the Pikunis and the white men ("the Napikwans"), who deliberately violate treaties and initiate hostilities with the hard-pressed red men, leading up to a searing experience based on the Marias River Massacre. There is much to savor in this remarkable book: the ease with which Fools Crow and his brethren converse with animals and spirits, the importance of dreams in their daily lives, the customs and ceremonies that measure the natural seasons and a person’s lifespan. Without violating the patterns of Native American speech, Welsh writes in prose that surges and sings. We follow Fools Crow’s growth from a boy in a traditional community to a man, responsible for keeping his family and tribe together through terrible challenges.
Red Rover (Hardcover) by Deirdre McNamer $16.47
As boys, brothers Aidan and Neil Tierney ride the Montana prairie on horseback, yearning for adventure. As men, they find it: Neil pilots a B-29 over Japan, while Aidan hunts Nazis in Argentina for the FBI. But although they both return from the war, Aidan proves a casualty nonetheless. Sickened by a mysterious ailment, suffering almost more from disillusionment, he won’t survive 1946. Spanning the years 1927 through 2003 and employing richly layered, interlocking points of view, McNamer teases out the surprising truth behind Aidan’s death, portraying an era of idealism and of myopia and paranoia. If the high plains and deep valleys of Montana seem an unlikely place to play out the cynical spy hunting of the J. Edgar Hoover era, modern-day echoesallegations of profiteering in Iraqחremind us that no place on earth is too remote to be touched by the prevailing winds. This loses a bit of pace in the middle, but the powerful ending rewards the time spent getting there. Elegant and assured, with a joy in language that shows on every page.
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